The Lens of Deviance

As Muslims in North America and the West, we often feel besieged, right, we're not the majority, everybody's trying to mess with us, whether illegally from the right and the left, or whether it comes to ideologically undermining sort of what Islam is about, we're treated as a threat, we're treated as sort of like this fifth column, all these sorts of pressures. And the situation that we find ourselves in, it creates pressure on the inside of the Muslim community, it's almost as if we feel like we have to shore up any of the differences between us if we're going to survive, if we're going to keep Islam what it is. And that is a good sentiment in general, but sometimes it can be

over applied. And sometimes we can get carried away with it to the point where we are looking at people who occupy legitimate positions within the Islamic scholarly tradition. And we're looking at them now from the lens of deviance. And we know that other people are out there trying to water down a slab. And now we're triggered. And we say, well, these people are part of the same project to water down a slab or the opposite from the other side, right? So we just have to be super, super careful, because that's not always true. Okay? If something is actually sourced in, you know, indigenously, in our tradition, we can't look back in an anachronistic way. And just because there's

certain sorts of opinions that seem to be more flexible, or, you know, less strict or something like that, or there seems to be a certain amount of diversity in the past and in accepted opinions, we can't look back. And now say that, well, this is just the watering down of Islam. And this is just, you know, the liberal infiltration of Islam or these sorts of things, not necessarily. Now, that being said, somebody also from the position of today 2022 can be going back and mining, the Islamic tradition for all of those sort of like easiest opinions and all these sorts of things in a way where they are trying to completely watered down Islam and restructure the whole thing and make it

into this thing that's very accepted by the nation state or a secular liberalism, or all these sorts of things, but we can't conflate the two, all right, we have to be really careful. Not every single thing is, you know, a Trojan horse against the snap, there are some people who are operating within the tradition, and there are some people who are abusing the tradition or operating from outside the tradition. And as Muslims, we need to be careful and differentiate between the two. And if you're not able to differentiate between the two, then you should probably not say anything, because you don't have the ability to differentiate between the two, we have to rely on the people who are

qualified in the scholars to sort out these academic issues, who's really besieging us from outside and trying to change us from the inside and who is really just Yes, they're actually operating within the tradition and even the full diversity, the accepted diversity of the tradition, but it might be surprising to some people that that is actually part of our tradition and deep right so sometimes this makes us make enemies out of each other in a way that is unnecessary and overblown. And it's just something that Muslims have to be very, very cautious of